A burning laptop that frightened passengers at Los Angeles International Airport over the weekend was a ThinkPad, Lenovo confirmed Wednesday, and that notebook ships with Sony's battery technology.

at the Web site Something Awful, involved a passenger running back up the jetway as a plane was boarding with a smoking laptop that eventually caught fire. Lenovo dispatched a team of investigators to Los Angeles within 12 hours of the incident, and confirmed that the laptop was a ThinkPad T43, said Ray Gorman, a company spokesman.

Because the area of the computer containing the battery was severely burned as a result of the incident, Lenovo has yet to confirm that the ThinkPad T43 was using one of Sony's batteries, Gorman said. That model does ship with Sony's batteries, but some notebook users choose to use different batteries after they purchase the system, he said.

At the time of the Dell and Apple recalls, Lenovo took great pains to distance itself from its competitors, saying it uses a different charging voltage in its notebooks and has a different design for its battery casing.

Lenovo and Sony are working together to determine if the battery involved in last weekend's incident was one of the ones involved in the recall, and more information is expected over the next couple of days, Lenovo's Gorman said.